January 27, 2016
PARIS — The international wealth-redistribution schemesof the United Nations, justified under the guise of battling alleged man-made global warming, are really a massive subsidy to kleptocrats ruling poor countries paid for by the poor and middle classes of wealthier and freer nations, according to internationally renowned physicist Dr. Fred Singer.
On top of that, the professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia said, the burden of proof in attributing climate changes to human activities is on man-made global-warming theorists seeking to regulate and control carbon dioxide, and not on skeptics. And so far, the alarmists have failed to demonstrate that mankind is responsible forany measurable impact on the climate, he said.
Speaking at the Heartland Institute's “Day of Examining the Data” conference in Paris, which took place during the UN's COP21 climate summit last month, Singer and other scientists from around the world denounced the global-warming alarmism coming out of the nearby UN confab. Among other concerns, the experts said there was no climate crisis — much less a man-made one — and that the real agenda of the UN involves primarily money and power, not the climate.
Dr. Singer, an atmospheric and space physicist with unassailable scientific credentials, told The New American in an interview after his speech that climate science was far from settled, and that taxpayer money distributed by governments was buying the cooperation of scientists. He also suggested that human impacts on the climate, if there are any, are likely to be so tiny as to be completely insignificant.
“The climate has always been changing — warming and cooling, warming and cooling,” Singer said. “So we assume that this is a continuing process. The fact that we are now fairly well advanced in the industrial revolution — it has no influence on natural forcing, we don't affect what the sun does, we don't affect the volcanoes. So the null hypothesis, which means the normal way events go, we would assume that all changes in climate, even today, are due to the same kinds of natural forcing.”
The burden of proof, then, is on the alarmists demanding trillions of dollars and vast new controls over humanity under the guise of battling alleged anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW) — not the other way around. “The null hypothesis that has to be disproven or amended is that natural forcings are changing the climate, simply because it's always been that way and we would assume that it would continue that way,” Singer emphasized. “So the burden of proof definitely has to be on the people who want to control CO2.” Other speakers at the summit emphasized that CO2 is the gas of life, not pollution.
And overcoming that burden will be a very tough, assuming it is even possible. “In all honesty, I will tell you that they have a very difficult job, I don't want that job of having to prove that,” said Singer, founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). “We're quite open to the idea that maybe CO2 does have some influence, but it has to be demonstrated,” he continued. “So far, they have not been able to demonstrate uniquely to our satisfaction that CO2 has any measurable influence.”
